The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (best large ereader TXT) 📖

the

stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St.

George’s Hill and the woods of Painshill.

 

But facing that crescent everywhere—at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton,

Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and across

the flat grass meadows to the north of it, wherever a cluster of trees

or village houses gave sufficient cover—the guns were waiting. The

signal rockets burst and rained their sparks through the night and

vanished, and the spirit of all those watching batteries rose to a

tense expectation. The Martians had but to advance into the line of

fire, and instantly those motionless black forms of men, those guns

glittering so darkly in the early night, would explode into a

thunderous fury of battle.

 

No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those

vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle—how

much they understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions

were organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret

our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady

investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of

onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might

exterminate us? (At that time no one knew what food they needed.) A

hundred such questions struggled together in my mind as I watched that

vast sentinel shape. And in the back of my mind was the sense of all

the huge unknown and hidden forces Londonward. Had they prepared

pitfalls? Were the powder mills at Hounslow ready as a snare? Would

the Londoners have the heart and courage to make a greater Moscow of

their mighty province of houses?

 

Then, after an interminable time, as it seemed to us, crouching and

peering through the hedge, came a sound like the distant concussion of

a gun. Another nearer, and then another. And then the Martian beside

us raised his tube on high and discharged it, gunwise, with a heavy

report that made the ground heave. The one towards Staines answered

him. There was no flash, no smoke, simply that loaded detonation.

 

I was so excited by these heavy minute-guns following one another

that I so far forgot my personal safety and my scalded hands as to

clamber up into the hedge and stare towards Sunbury. As I did so a

second report followed, and a big projectile hurtled overhead towards

Hounslow. I expected at least to see smoke or fire, or some such

evidence of its work. But all I saw was the deep blue sky above, with

one solitary star, and the white mist spreading wide and low beneath.

And there had been no crash, no answering explosion. The silence was

restored; the minute lengthened to three.

 

“What has happened?” said the curate, standing up beside me.

 

“Heaven knows!” said I.

 

A bat flickered by and vanished. A distant tumult of shouting

began and ceased. I looked again at the Martian, and saw he was now

moving eastward along the riverbank, with a swift, rolling motion,

 

Every moment I expected the fire of some hidden battery to spring

upon him; but the evening calm was unbroken. The figure of the Martian

grew smaller as he receded, and presently the mist and the gathering

night had swallowed him up. By a common impulse we clambered higher.

Towards Sunbury was a dark appearance, as though a conical hill had

suddenly come into being there, hiding our view of the farther

country; and then, remoter across the river, over Walton, we saw

another such summit. These hill-like forms grew lower and broader

even as we stared.

 

Moved by a sudden thought, I looked northward, and there I

perceived a third of these cloudy black kopjes had risen.

 

Everything had suddenly become very still. Far away to the

southeast, marking the quiet, we heard the Martians hooting to one

another, and then the air quivered again with the distant thud of

their guns. But the earthly artillery made no reply.

 

Now at the time we could not understand these things, but later I

was to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes that gathered in the

twilight. Each of the Martians, standing in the great crescent I have

described, had discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he carried, a

huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other

possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of him. Some fired

only one of these, some two—as in the case of the one we had seen;

the one at Ripley is said to have discharged no fewer than five at

that time. These canisters smashed on striking the ground—they did

not explode—and incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy,

inky vapour, coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus

cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the

surrounding country. And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of

its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes.

 

It was heavy, this vapour, heavier than the densest smoke, so that,

after the first tumultuous uprush and outflow of its impact, it sank

down through the air and poured over the ground in a manner rather

liquid than gaseous, abandoning the hills, and streaming into the

valleys and ditches and watercourses even as I have heard the

carbonic-acid gas that pours from volcanic clefts is wont to do. And

where it came upon water some chemical action occurred, and the

surface would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank

slowly and made way for more. The scum was absolutely insoluble, and

it is a strange thing, seeing the instant effect of the gas, that one

could drink without hurt the water from which it had been strained.

The vapour did not diffuse as a true gas would do. It hung together

in banks, flowing sluggishly down the slope of the land and driving

reluctantly before the wind, and very slowly it combined with the mist

and moisture of the air, and sank to the earth in the form of dust.

Save that an unknown element giving a group of four lines in the blue

of the spectrum is concerned, we are still entirely ignorant of the

nature of this substance.

 

Once the tumultuous upheaval of its dispersion was over, the black

smoke clung so closely to the ground, even before its precipitation,

that fifty feet up in the air, on the roofs and upper stories of high

houses and on great trees, there was a chance of escaping its poison

altogether, as was proved even that night at Street Cobham and Ditton.

 

The man who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful story of

the strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he looked down from the

church spire and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts out

of its inky nothingness. For a day and a half he remained there,

weary, starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and

against the prospect of the distant hills a velvet-black expanse, with

red roofs, green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates,

barns, outhouses, and walls, rising here and there into the sunlight.

 

But that was at Street Cobham, where the black vapour was allowed

to remain until it sank of its own accord into the ground. As a rule

the Martians, when it had served its purpose, cleared the air of it

again by wading into it and directing a jet of steam upon it.

 

This they did with the vapour banks near us, as we saw in the

starlight from the window of a deserted house at Upper Halliford,

whither we had returned. From there we could see the searchlights on

Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill going to and fro, and about eleven the

windows rattled, and we heard the sound of the huge siege guns that

had been put in position there. These continued intermittently for

the space of a quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the

invisible Martians at Hampton and Ditton, and then the pale beams of

the electric light vanished, and were replaced by a bright red glow.

 

Then the fourth cylinder fell—a brilliant green meteor—as I

learned afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the Richmond

and Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful cannonade far

away in the southwest, due, I believe, to guns being fired haphazard

before the black vapour could overwhelm the gunners.

 

So, setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out a

wasps’ nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling vapour over the

Londonward country. The horns of the crescent slowly moved apart,

until at last they formed a line from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden.

All night through their destructive tubes advanced. Never once, after

the Martian at St. George’s Hill was brought down, did they give the

artillery the ghost of a chance against them. Wherever there was a

possibility of guns being laid for them unseen, a fresh canister of

the black vapour was discharged, and where the guns were openly

displayed the Heat-Ray was brought to bear.

 

By midnight the blazing trees along the slopes of Richmond Park and

the glare of Kingston Hill threw their light upon a network of black

smoke, blotting out the whole valley of the Thames and extending as

far as the eye could reach. And through this two Martians slowly

waded, and turned their hissing steam jets this way and that.

 

They were sparing of the Heat-Ray that night, either because they

had but a limited supply of material for its production or because

they did not wish to destroy the country but only to crush and overawe

the opposition they had aroused. In the latter aim they certainly

succeeded. Sunday night was the end of the organised opposition to

their movements. After that no body of men would stand against them,

so hopeless was the enterprise. Even the crews of the torpedo-boats

and destroyers that had brought their quick-firers up the Thames

refused to stop, mutinied, and went down again. The only offensive

operation men ventured upon after that night was the preparation of

mines and pitfalls, and even in that their energies were frantic and

spasmodic.

 

One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those batteries

towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the twilight. Survivors there

were none. One may picture the orderly expectation, the officers

alert and watchful, the gunners ready, the ammunition piled to hand,

the limber gunners with their horses and waggons, the groups of

civilian spectators standing as near as they were permitted, the

evening stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents with the burned

and wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of the shots the

Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling over the trees and

houses and smashing amid the neighbouring fields.

 

One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the

swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing

headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable

darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon

its victims, men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking,

falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men

choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of

the opaque cone of smoke. And then night and extinction—nothing but

a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.

 

Before dawn the black vapour was pouring through the streets of

Richmond, and the disintegrating organism of government was, with a

last expiring effort, rousing the population of London to the

necessity of flight.